Back in the days before Netflix, those of a certain vintage will remember Sunday morning rituals featuring Derek O’Brien emerging from behind gaudily-designed sliding doors to fire a barrage of general-knowledge questions at preppy looking kids. Rewind another generation and things would have been quite different. As incomprehensible as it may seem to GenY, the humble transistor radio was the magnet which drew families and friends together to listen to a voice that’s still regarded as the stuff of legend.
His voice has mellowed with time, but Ameen Sayani, now 82, was the man behind the Bournvita Quiz Contest popularly known as the Bournvita Blast. The tagline was “Brought up right, Bournvita bright” and there was no shortage of ambitious parents buying vast quantities of the beverage in the forlorn hope of boosting the grey matter of their offspring with a chocolate-flavoured health drink.
My family were Horlicks fans, but as usual I am getting ahead of myself. A little background is required in order to set the scene and introduce the players, so here goes:
Uncle Raja, a fussy, hypochondriac, congenital (make that confirmed) bachelor of some forty summers. Aunt Selvi, a brisk, bossy, no-nonsense doctor with a take-no-prisoners approach to life, death and disease.
At mealtimes, Uncle Raja had the annoying habit of re-directing the conversation to his real and imaginary ailments with a skill that bordered on genius. For someone who flaunted ignorance on a positively cosmic scale, he displayed remarkable ingenuity when it came to medical linkages. We could be discussing anything — gold, adultery or the Middle East and the old boy would slip in some gory detail about his boils or some such noxious disorder. “The late MGR thought he had found the fountain of youth — he took gold injections to keep his skin glowing and youthful,” he would solemnly intone. “But the gold deposits built up in his kidneys and caused his untimely demise,” he would add in a mournful afterthought. “Should have deposited his gold in a bank, not in his silly kidneys,” was Aunt Selvi’s riposte.
“The Bible says if a man looks at a woman with lust in his heart then he has committed adultery with her in his mind,” was another of his favourite clichés. Unfortunately, the mention of “heart” would distract him from the racy theme of sex and we would endure a long bulletin on his ventricles or the state of his inferior vena cava. During a particularly tense argument regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Raja butted in with the nugget that Yasser Arafat had piles and Menachem Begin syphilis, and confused the hell out of the debaters by wondering whether it was the other way around. Whenever the discussion showed signs of aspiring towards the sublime, he promptly dragged it to the realms of the ridiculous.
After a particularly gruesome soliloquy (with sound effects) on the state of his colon and the merits of colonic irrigation (as against antibiotics) as a palliative, Aunt Selvi decided that she had had enough. Raja claimed to be a card-carrying patient of the “ulcerative-colitis” brigade and despite possessing the appetite of a horse, declared his inability to handle the spicy biryani dished up by Aunt Selvi that evening. “You all enjoy baba. I can’t eat because of my condition,” he meekly announced, with a martyred expression.
Aunt Selvi snapped; not merely were her professional skills being questioned, her culinary technique was now being dissed. “Give me a sample,” she snarled, “I’ll take it down to the lab and we will find out once and for all what your problem is.”
The next morning, her good humour restored, she descended for breakfast with a spring in her step and a song on her lips. Having breakfasted heartily, she noticed a large tin of Bournvita nestling cheek-by-jowl with her favourite mug in place of her usual Nescafe. “What’s this?” she asked blithely, “are you giving me health drinks instead of my caffeine boost?”, as she opened the tin…
I hope I will never again hear the raw anguish, the keening wail of misery and sheer, unmitigated horror in her shriek when she discovered just how generous Raja had been when it came to offering up a sample for medical science to wrestle with. There’s a silver lining though: as a fall-out of what we refer to in hushed tones as the “Bournvita Blast”, all medical discussions are forbidden at mealtimes.
